The mistake here would be to think that this is down to the host intellectual property not having a prior mainstream audience, or whatever that means. The reality is that much of the problems in this movie could have been avoided if its production had bothered to understand what it was adapting in the first place, as it's clear it alienated the fan base it needed to generate positive word of mouth from the get go.

On the movie itself, it’s as much of a mess as I was expecting it to be. It lifts all manner of extraneous plot points from across the manga, anime movies and anime series in the hope it can nail the world of Ghost in the Shell in a scattershot fashion.

When I interviewed Mamoru Oshii recently, the director of the 1995 anime film adaptation, he rightly said that the original manga was too complex to be straight up adapted into a single movie. While he thinks he failed in his task, what he and his team did do was keep the narrative focused on a single plot from the manga.

In that, the original 1995 anime movie took one main narrative from the manga and inferred the complexity of the world through other means. Even for the anime movie sequel Innocence, it broadly took the inspiration from the manga story Robot Rondo and fleshed it out into a whole movie.

There is a good reason why you do this and that’s because, unlike a sprawling manga, a movie has a limited window of time in which to impart its story. Focusing on a single narrative from the manga then makes sense.

In comparison, this live-action adaptation tries to pull from disparate adaptations of the main source at once and the result is a confused mess. Ironically, if the production had gone back to the original manga and tried to adapt a single story from that directly then the result might have been something more coherent and likely generated a better word of mouth from the fans.

The latter point is also something I want to highlight and that is if you buy an intellectual property like Ghost in the Shell, then you need to appease its fans first as they will evangelize the film once it is released.

You've got a movie that is very important to the fanboys since it's based on a Japanese anime movie. So you're always trying to thread that needle between honouring the source material and make a movie for a mass audience. That's challenging, but clearly the reviews didn't help.

There’s a lot to unpick in that single quote but there are two main things that stand out here as being obvious issues.

The first is that Ghost in the Shell started out as a manga and not an anime movie. The second is that demeaning fanboys indicates an obvious cultural problem in Hollywood currently.

The reason why most movie adaptations tend to be awful is often because the people that understand the source material are regarded as social outcasts within places like Hollywood. That means their expertise is dismissed.

This othering of anime and manga is something that is still an issue in Hollywood and I would even go so far as to say that people there are ashamed of having any expertise in this field, which brings me back to this live-action Ghost in the Shell movie.

It blindly copies parts from the anime and manga without understanding their context. Such as the original mecha design work from the 1995 anime movie by Shoji Kawamori and Atsushi Takeuchi. It’s jarring because they are out of place; especially in the Deus Ex type approach this movie took in places.

It feels as if they copied a few elements that the “fanboys” were familiar with and then that would somehow appease them. It’s a shallow and flawed strategy and shows that a real understanding of the source material was obviously lacking.

Overall, as someone that has read the manga and seen the subsequent anime adaptations of Ghost in the Shell, this live-action movie was a mess. Mostly because of the narrative and how it was handled but also the complete lack of insight and understanding about what Ghost in the Shell actually is.

My only hope is that the powers that be in Hollywood take a long hard look at what went wrong with this adaptation and realize that that the “fanboys” are the expertise they need here. After all if Kevin Feige can make the Marvel movies work, isn’t it time Hollywood found similar counterparts for the respective anime and manga properties it is so eager to capitalize on?